from the it-depends dept

As Techdirt readers
are no-doubt well aware, online surveillance laws are undergoing
a major revamp across the western world. From
Australia to the
UK, law enforcement agencies are
taking the opportunity to gain unprecedented powers over the
data they can monitor, and are blaming the crackdown on
everything from illegal file-sharing to terrorists. With western
nations becoming increasingly hostile toward the concept of
online anonymity, it's not unreasonable to suggest the use of
commercial VPNs will likely gain more traction (indeed, there's
already some
evidence supporting this). But can VPNs really safeguard
your privacy today and, in the future, what kind of protection
can you expect with the legal landscape changing so rapidly?

It's certainly true
all VPNs have the ability to track users and log their data.
Many do so because they don't consider themselves privacy
services and logging helps identify repeat DMCA infringers and
quickly troubleshoot network issues. Others do so seemingly because
of
a poor grasp of their country's laws.

Of course, anyone
concerned about privacy should not sign-up to a service that's
retaining data. Most privacy-orientated VPNs approach this issue
by using a non-persistent log (stored in memory) on gateway
servers that only stores a few minutes of activity (FIFO). That
time window gives the ability to troubleshoot any connection
problems that may appear, but after a few minutes no trace of
activity is stored.

As you may know the
EU's Data
Retention
Directive came into effect in
2006, requiring “public communications services” to hold web
logs and email logs, amongst other data. IVPN, along with a
number of other EU based VPNs, believe our services are excluded
from this requirement and we do not abide by it. So far there's
been no cases we're aware of compelling VPNs to retain this
information. Indeed, from a user perspective, the presence or
absence of retention laws seem rather arbitrary, given how many
US-based VPNs willingly retain data, despite no
government-mandated policy being in place (at
least
not yet).

When law
enforcement and VPNs collide...

So what happens if a
law enforcement agency approaches a VPN, serves a a subpoena,
and demands a the company trace an individual, based on the
timestamp and the IP address of one of their servers? VPN
services, like all businesses, are compelled to abide by the
law. However, there is no way of complying with the authorities
if the data they require does not exist.

One of the few ways
law enforcement could identify an individual using a privacy
service, without logs, is if they served the owners a gag order
and demanded they start logging the traffic on a particular
server they know their suspect is using. We would shut down our
business before co-operating with such an order and any VPN
serious about privacy would do the same. So unless law
enforcement were to arrest the VPN owners on the spot, and
recover their keys and password before they could react, your
privacy would be protected.

A changing
landscape...

But the biggest
threat to VPN usage is the changing legal landscape. The waters
around the issues presented by VPNs are still being tested and
laws may indeed be amended in the future to prevent such
services operating in certain jurisdictions. So how do you
navigate all this?

In all honesty,
there are no easy answers. Picking a host country based on their
current laws isn't going to help much in the long term. By far
the best measure you can take is to choose a VPN that
demonstrates a commitment to user privacy. Examine the company's
small print, or, better yet, contact the owners and ask them
upfront how far they go to protect your personal data. Ensure
the company is committed to keeping users informed of any
emerging threats to its service and – before buying any lengthy
subscription – make sure the VPN is willing to re-domicile
should its host country change any relevant laws.

from the no-need-to-do-that dept

We recently wrote about how academic publisher, Edwin Mellen, was both suing an online critic as well as having its lawyers send highly questionable threat letters to blogs and commenters who were criticizing the company. As part of that, we were disappointed to see the website Scholarly Kitchen, a blog of the Society of Scholarly Publishing, cave in the face of legal threats and pull down the blog post when it was clear that the post broke no laws (the threat letter even admitted as much). The board of SSP has since talked about it and agreed to reinstate the blog post.

For many reasons I won't go into the ingredients of the sausage by explaining why the posts came down and why they went back up. I will say that the Board and the Scholarly Kitchen volunteers stand behind Rick's posts. The Board also stands behind the business and editorial decisions to take them down last week, until we could gather our busy volunteer leaders to fully evaluate the situation.

I can understand why a blog might pull such a post after getting such a letter. It's no fun to be the target of a legal nastygram, no matter how sure you may be that you're right. Even if you know with 100% certainty that you would win any such lawsuit, just the very threat of one could be attention, time and money draining. This is why such legal nastygrams can often be so effective in creating chilling effects around speech.

That said, I also think it's important for people to recognize the value of standing up for their rights in the face of such threats. Otherwise those rights get eaten away. On that note, I think that SSP could have and should have also reposted the "comment" which they say they took down. As we discussed in our initial article, Kristine Hunt's comments (which were actually mostly supportive of Edwin Mellen) seemed unlikely to reach the level of defamation -- but, much more importantly, this has no bearing on SSP's liability. Section 230 of the CDA is pretty clear that, as the service provider, they are not liable for such comments, even if they are aware of them and leave them up. It is, of course, SSP's decision as to whether or not to remove any comments (or posts) on its site, but I'm a bit surprised they'd remove that comment when the caselaw on Section 230 is pretty clear. Some courts have even ruled that sites have no obligation to remove such content even after the statements have been judged to be defamatory (though that's not agreed upon across the board). But, at this stage, merely on accusation, SSP is clearly protected by Section 230, so it's unfortunate that they still chose to remove that comment.

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder? Apparently, some people will go to great lengths to achieve a certain look -- such as by injecting their face with various foreign substances. Here are a few examples of some scary things people will do for beauty.

Ever heard of a "blood facial"? Blood is first drawn from your arm, and then centrifuged to separate the plasma and platelets from the red blood cells. The platelets are then "infused" back into your face. This involves having your face poked all over with micro-needles. The platelets supposedly contain growth factors that might stimulate new collagen growth in the face. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Diglot Books Ltd has today been told that Kindle Direct Publishing will not publish their bilingual children's picture book Matthew and the Wellington Boots because it is written in Cornish.

The book which was released for St Piran's Day earlier this month has been successfully launched on the iTunes platform, but will not be available to Android or Kindle Fire users because "the book is in a language that is not currently supported by Kindle Direct Publishing."

Fair enough, you might think -- if Cornish uses some weird alphabet not supported by Amazon, there's not much to be done. Except that's not the case:

The Cornish language which uses exactly the same alphabet as the English language has been on the rise since its recognition as a living language in 2002 under the European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages, and is now spoken fluently by several thousand people.

That is, no special characters are needed, as the Cornish Wikipedia's page on the language demonstrates, so there is no technical reason for Amazon not to publish the book. Clearly, this is just an arbitrary decision on the company's part, one that it is essentially impossible to appeal against.

As the press release from the publishers quoted above notes, Diglot Books were able to use iTunes to offer their ebook instead. Some might say this is a case of out of the frying pan into the fire, since in the past Apple too has shown itself inflexible in terms of what it will and won't accept. Had Apple refused to carry the title for whatever reason, it's arguable that the Cornish language, still struggling to re-establish itself after dying out a couple of hundred years ago, would have suffered as a result of this lack of access to the main ebook distributors.

Promoting Cornish may not be high on everyone's list of priorities, but Amazon's refusal to publish the first ebook in the language provides another worrying example of how it is failing to use its increasing global power responsibly.

A Texas state trooper charged with sexually assaulting two women during a traffic stop was providing them with "customer service," says Dale Roberts, the executive director of the Columbia Police Officers Association (CPOA) and a professor at the University of Missouri. (The CPOA is a part of the Fraternal Order of Police, one of the country's largest police unions.)

"It's called Customer Service!" Roberts wrote in a March 27 Facebook post about the indictment of Texas State Trooper Kelly Helleson, who was charged with two counts of sexual assault after conducting an illegal roadside strip search of two women. "We just did it so they wouldn't have to make the trip all the way down to the station," he added.

Beautiful.

Granted, Dale Roberts isn't actually a government employee, but he is a member of a group that is pretty much inseparable from law enforcement. Roberts, through his personal Facebook account, has managed to portray the groups he represents as populated with the sort of people who laugh off serious police misconduct. As you can see in the screenshot archived by Keep Columbia Free, Roberts seemed to think that it was worth joking repeatedly about this indictment.

Obviously, Angel Dobbs and her niece Ashley probably don't see the humor in the situation because they were the "situation." Here's a quick rundown of the events that led to Trooper Helleson's indictment.

The two women were pulled over last year by Helleson and fellow trooper David Farrell (who was charged with theft when a bottle of prescription pills went missing from Dobbs' vehicle after the illegal search) in Irving, Texas, after throwing a cigarette butt out the window of their car. Farrell came up to the car and claimed he smelled marijuana. When a search of the vehicle didn't turn up any pot, he instructed Helleson to conduct a cavity search on the women, who Farrell said were "acting weird." That's when Helleson, in plain view of passing cars on Highway 161 (and the dashboard camera in her cruiser), stuck her hand down the back and front of both women's pants, searching their genitals. To make matters worse, Helleson conducted both searches without changing her latex gloves. In short order, the Dobbs filed suit and video of the stop was posted on Youtube. [Following video possibly NSFW.]

As if his original post wasn't offensive enough, Robert's followed it up with another pithy sexual assault joke, stating "Evidently, the [sic] searched them downtown without going downtown." It should also be noted that Roberts has a hard time keeping his keyboard from overriding his better judgement. He was also criticized for a making a racist joke on the CPOA's Facebook page (where he is an administrator) last month.

Government agencies and closely-aligned entities contain just as many badly behaving and ill-mannered people as any cross section of the populace. Harsh social media policies are a direct result of actions like these. It would be nice to see people like Roberts weeded out of influential organizations by this sort of offensive stupidity, but the most common reaction seems to be across-the-board social media restrictions. Muzzling people with policy is simpler than cleaning up any internet messes they might make.

Whether Roberts likes it or not, he is the face of the CPOA, whether posting on the association's Facebook page or his personal one. He may just be "joking," but his subject matter isn't appropriate considering his position with the police union. Roberts is welcome to say whatever he wants, but the CPOA would be greatly served by ousting a repeat offender that portrays the organization in a negative light. Silence on this matter implies approval of Roberts' comments and strongly suggests that many in the organization believe that abusing citizens is not only OK, but inherently funny.

from the oops dept

We've argued repeatedly how silly it is for courts to move forward with cases over patent infringement while the USPTO is reviewing those same patents. Considering just how often patent re-exams lead to changes in the patents (including rejecting key claims), moving forward before the USPTO has ruled is kind of silly. It's guaranteed to lead to bad rulings. The latest is that the USPTO has issued a "final" rejection of Apple's "rubberbanding" patent (US Patent 7,469,381), which was one of the patents at issue in the Samsung Apple patent fight, and which the jury said Samsung infringed. In fact, the specific claim (19) that Samsung was said to have infringed was rejected by the USPTO.

We had noted a non-final rejection last fall, and now the USPTO has reiterated that with a final rejection. Of course, even "final rejection" is a bit of a misnomer, since Apple can (and probably will) still appeal to the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB). Still, given the significant doubt over the quality of the patent, it seems crazy to assume that it was valid as part of the lawsuit.

Also, in the meantime, if we're going to grant massively powerful, technology-landscape-changing patents to companies, is it really so much to ask that the USPTO not get it wrong so damn often? The fact that, on second review, they suddenly realize "oops, that was a mistake!" seems like the kind of thing that we should be worried about, given just how much power there is in a single bad patent.

from the not-this-again dept

Art Neill, from the very cool non-profit group New Media Rights (which provides legal services/advocacy for internet users and creators), alerts us to an unfortunate story involving YouTube pulling down a band's video, claiming terms of service violations, but refusing to explain much more. We've discussed multiple times before that one of Google's Achilles Heels for competitors is its big white monolith problem, in which if you have a problem with Google, reaching an actual human being in customer service is nearly impossible. That seems to be the case with this story.

It involves a comedy group / rock band called Fortress of Attitude. A few months back, they released a video on YouTube for a song they wrote, called PS Gay Car, in response to a homophobic note that someone left on a band member's cars a few years ago. They basically took the note and turned it into the lyrics for a song, mocking the homophobic message. The video got lots of attention, including high traffic places like the Huffington Post and College Humor. The video on YouTube racked up nearly 40,000 views.

And then it was gone. You can still see it on Funny or Die, but YouTube removed it entirely, claiming a terms of service violation.

YouTube sent them a note saying that they had violated the terms of service of the site by using "any automated system, including without limitations, "robots," "spiders," or "offline readers," that access the Service in a manner that sends more request messages to the YouTube servers in a given period of time than a human can reasonably produce in the same period by using a conventional online browser."

The folks at Fortress of Attitude insist they did nothing of the sort:

So, note up front: we 100% did not engage in any activity of that sort. First of all, our group policy is that robots are scary and will someday enslave us all, and therefore we do not engage in any activities involving robots—especially activities such as artificially inflating Youtube views.

Secondly it is very clear why the video had gotten its views. Popular websites posted the video, thereby putting it in front of their readerships, and it was spread around. As a group we did nothing more than email the link out to our mailing list, post it on our Facebook pages, and send it to these media outlets. Trying to create artificial views for our work is not something we would do, and it also seems like WAY too much work.

After finding no easy way to actually respond to the claimed violation, nor any way to directly contact anyone at YouTube, they went to New Media Rights who has been trying, repeatedly to contact folks at YouTube, without much luck. The emailed responses don't address any of the points raised by NMR, but rather just appear to be robotic-like responses insisting that the account was found to violate that term and saying that "due to the reasons previously stated, we will not be restoring the content." No matter how many times NMR points out that "the reasons previously stated" are not accurate, they can't seem to get anyone from YouTube to actually communicate as a human about what the problem is.

The band is especially worried since it has a bunch of videos on YouTube and the note from Google threatens to kill their entire account if similar "violations" occur.

To some extent, you can understand why Google does this. I'm sure that there are plenty of people trying to game the system and boost pageviews. And, I'm sure that plenty of them insist that they're innocent. Having full time people responding to a bunch of those folks would probably be a huge waste of time. But what happens when you have a situation where the flag and takedown happened in error?

from the is-actually-Dolan-water dept

April Fool's Day. Either you love it or you hate it. There's not much middle ground. As a writer on The Internet, April Fool's Day is a 24-hour deathtrap composed of plausible stories that will set you on fire the moment you press the Publish button. It turns even the most cheerful of writers into a deeply cynical curmudgeon, one who approaches each possible scoop with more suspicion than the heavily-bearded guy down the street who's building a bunker under his garage and frequently answers the door wearing nothing but a shotgun. (Much of this reverts back to normal following the "holiday," but each year adds another layer of resentful suspicion. In fact, if you cut open a writer, you can simply count the rings to determine how many years they've been in the business.)

For many people, though, April Fool's Day is a 24-hour period filled with lighthearted pranks and sub-Onion quasi-satire. They love cheerful shenanigans and they love being fooled. Except when they don't. Then it's suddenly "gone too far" and concerned foolees start pressing for "something to be done about it." This is one of those stories, the kind where you can't fool all of the people all of the time, but you can temporarily fool enough of them that someone gets seriously pissed off.

Florida country radio morning-show hosts Val St. John and Scott Fish are currently serving indefinite suspensions and possibly worse over a successful April Fools' Day prank. They told their listeners that "dihydrogen monoxide" was coming out of the taps throughout the Fort Myers area.

If you're not familiar with the term "dihydrogen monoxide," you'll be thrilled to know that the compound is damn near everywhere. Not only that, but its ubiquity has prompted many a petition to be signed fervently in favor of banning the dangerous-sounding substance completely. No one's really sure what makes it so dangerous, but anything containing two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen can't be completely safe.

Of course, anyone who's paid attention over the last couple of decades (at least) knows that dihydrogen monoxide is water. What's surprising is that a couple of pranking DJs could find enough people unaware of this fact to a.) pull off the prank and b.) possibly face felony charges. Wait... what?

[A]pparently, the station, the water works, and perhaps the authorities are still trying to figure out if the two hosts could face felony charges for, again, reporting that the scientific name of water was coming out of the pipes. "My understanding is it is a felony to call in a false water quality issue," Diane Holm, a public information officer for Lee County, told WTSP, while Renda stood firm about his deejays: "They will have to deal with the circumstances."

It seems unlikely the DJ duo will actually face felony charges, but they are currently suspended after being yanked off the air in the middle of their morning show. Apparently, enough people expressed their concern about dihydrogen monoxide leakage that the local water utility was forced to issue a statement.

These reactions to an April Fool's prank that occurred on a day when pranks are to be expected seem rather overblown. The DJs are suspended indefinitely for technically telling the truth and the station has indicated the pair are facing additional punishment. Sure, nobody wants to feel like a fool, but that is the totality of April 1st. If this many people can't take being taken for a ride on the foolingest day of the year, then it's a clear sign that the national sense of humor is in critical condition. (We've already eulogized the national sense of proportion and scattered its ashes across a variety of moral panics and Terms of Service outrages.) To put it in more familiar terms, "If you can't laugh at yourself, the terrorists win."

[It appears the terrorists have won. (Again.) A poll on the radio station's website (warning: ads frickin' everywhere even with Adblock) shows that 78% of the respondents believe the DJs should return to the airwaves "never." (Poll is no longer live, but an "indefinite" suspension could technically lead to returning "never.")]

from the wtf dept

The NY Times has a slightly odd op-ed piece, written by Eamonn Fingleton, author of a book about how China is going to dominate the US economically. That may absolutely be true, but this oped tries to bend over backwards to prove that China will be more innovative than the US... and uses patents as a proxy:

Meanwhile the evidence of international patent filings is looking increasingly ominous. According to data compiled by the World Intellectual Property Organization, the world’s single most prolific filer of international patents as of 2011 was ZTE, a Chinese telecommunications corporation. Its filings were up an astounding fivefold from 2009. Another Chinese corporation, Huawei, moved up to third in the 2011 league table. The only United States corporation to make the Top 10 was Qualcomm.

First of all, the number of patents filed is meaningless. You can file a ton of patents and it means absolutely nothing concerning innovation. First off, applications are different from granted patents. Second, and more importantly, patents show no relation to innovation. Third, when it comes to Chinese patents, the Chinese realized long ago that patents are merely a tool for protectionist tariff-like policies that can be enacted with less scrutiny or trade war issues and have acted accordingly. Basically, nothing in the paragraph above actually supports Fingleton's argument.

But, then it gets much, much worse. He claims that the US somehow has a weaker patent system today than in the past (it doesn't) and then quotes another author claiming that Apple and Microsoft relied on strong patents to survive when they started out:

All this is the more troubling because United States patent law has now been drastically weakened. Congress has made it much harder for small American inventors to protect their intellectual property from infringement and theft.

Pat Choate, the author of “Hot Property,” a book on the theft of intellectual property, maintains that if the new patent regimen had existed when corporations like Apple and Microsoft first got going, they might never have made it out of the little leagues. Their patents would have been quickly infringed by predatory larger corporations, and rather than engage in unequal litigation battles against deep-pocketed and ruthless opponents, they could have felt forced to share their technology on concessionary terms.

Almost nothing in what's said above has any resemblance in the truth. The patent system hasn't been "drastically weakened" at all. Congress made some slight modifications to the patent system, which do nothing to make it harder for "small inventors to protect their intellectual property from infringement and theft."

As for the claims made by Pat Choate, I'm just left shaking my head. First of all, both of Apple and Microsoft's key success stories came from copying the works of other, larger companies when those companies failed to recognize what they had on their hands, and more or less let the upstarts take those ideas and run with them. Also, in both cases, other, larger companies did come in and try to copy them, and weren't that successful. Also, more importantly, neither company aggressively relied on patents to protect its works. Bill Gates famousely said the following about patents:

If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today. I feel certain that some large company will patent some obvious thing related to interface, object orientation, algorithm, application extension or other crucial technique. If we assume this company has no need of any of our patents then the have a 17-year right to take as much of our profits as they want.

Not exactly an example of Microsoft using patents to protect itself, but rather quite the opposite. Apple, in the meantime, relied heavily on ideas from Xerox and SRI in making its early computers -- some of which it licensed, and some of which it did not. However, much of the work was not heavily patented and while Apple received some early patents, it did little to enforce those patents to stop copycats (its most famous lawsuit, against Microsoft for copying the Windows interface, focused on copyright... and it failed, anyway).

You could easily argue that if Microsoft and Apple were started today they would absolutely be harmed by today's patent system, but not in the way that Choate or Fingleton suggest. Rather, they would be sued by trolls over and over and over again, meaning they'd be wasting money fighting lawsuits, and possibly wouldn't be able to survive that. What they needed to survive was an era in which patent enforcement was not common and especially one where patents were considered inapplicable to software.

Microsoft and Apple became massive success stories in part because of the weakness of the patent system in their era, because patents don't help innovation, they put a tollbooth on it. This article certainly puts a huge question mark over the quality of both Choate and Fingleton's work, as it shows little actual knowledge of the subject they're discussing.

Caller: First off, I just want to let you know that I'm recording the call for quality assurance...

Customer Service Rep: Unfortunately, I'm actually not authorizing you to do so, sir.

Caller: You're not authorized to do what?

Customer Service Rep: I'm not authorizing the recording, sir.

Caller: Oh, well you guys are recording the phone call on your end. Why can't I record it on my end?

Customer Service Rep: (long pause) Because it's the company sir.

Later on, the CSR admits that, yes, TWC is recording the call, and the caller requests the recording (guess how that goes?). The CSR continues to insist he's uncomfortable being recorded and is not giving any consent, so the caller more or less says the same thing and asks the CSR to turn off the recording on their end. And so it goes.

As a random aside, I'll just bring up the idiocy of places (including my home state of California) that have two party consent recording laws. If you are a party to the call, you should be able to record it without getting the consent of all participants.

from the fair-use? dept

Ah, Prince. The purple-loving musician has built up an irrational hatred for all things internet over the years, mostly focused on his belief that he should have 100% control over everything he has ever done. He's gone after companies and fans for posting pretty much anything. His music is also at the heart of the (still ongoing) Stephanie Lenz case, in which Universal Music Group issued a copyright takedown on a 29-second video with some Prince music in the background. In that case, the court said that UMG needed to take fair use into account before sending the takedown.

Given that, it seems rather surprising to find out that Prince is targeting even shorter clips -- including six second clips on Vine, the Twitter offshoot/acquisition, that allows people to post short video clips no longer than 6 seconds. Vine has built up a decent following pretty quickly, and it's difficult to see how anyone could argue that music appearing in such a Vine video wouldn't be either fair use or de minimis use (or both). But don't tell Prince that.

The DMCA takedown comes from NPG Records, which is Prince's personal record label, and names eight Vine clips, which apparently have all been removed. The notice was just sent on March 26, meaning we're still within the time frame in which someone could have filed a counternotice. One hopes that counternotices are being filed, and (perhaps) that someone is willing to challenge Prince on claiming that such videos are not fair use. Would he honestly claim that such a video harms the market for his music?

from the but-of-course dept

One of the many complaints about the "six strikes" Copyright Alert System (CAS) in the US is the fact that while it doesn't directly lead to litigation, there is nothing in the agreement that prevents copyright holders from seeking out and using information from the six strikes system in copyright infringement lawsuits. And, surprise surprise, it appears that at least one copyright trolling operation has jumped to the front of the line in testing this out. Malibu Media, who was already building up quite the reputation as a copyright troll (not quite Prenda-like, but still up there), is trying to get Verizon to cough up a ton of information, including details from its six strikes system.

As TorrentFreak notes, the list of information demanded via subpoena has been culled down to the following:

DMCA notices and if applicable six strike notices sent to the applicable subscribers.

Defendants’ bandwidth usage.

Information about the (reliability of the) correlation of the IP-Address to the subscriber for purposes of use at trial.

Content viewed by Defendants to the extent the content is the same show or movie that Plaintiff learned from third-party BitTorrent scanning companies that Defendants also used BitTorrent to download and distribute.

So far, Verizon (who has been one of the better companies in resisting copyright trolls) is objecting to handing over the information and has so far refused to do so, arguing that it does not wish to help "shakedown tactics" by copyright trolls. Malibu is now trying to have the court compel Verizon to cough up the info. Given that we'll likely see more of this, how the court responds should be worth following.

from the uh-that's-not-how-this-works dept

You may recall that, last fall, a Congressional investigation completely slammed Homeland Security's "Fusion Centers" -- noting that despite DHS insisting that they were critical to "fighting terrorism," the actual evidence showed that they had done nothing helpful in the fight against terrorism, but were instead chock full of wasteful (possibly fraudulent) spending... and with an added dose of civil liberties violations (just for fun).

Apparently, the Fusion Centers are trying to rehabilitate their own image, but they might want to send their officials to press training a bit more before sending them out into the wild. Reason alerts us to an interview that the director of the Arkansas State Fusion Center did with some local TV stations in which he appears to completely contradict himself -- first arguing that the Fusion Centers don't spy on Americans... and then saying they spy on "anti-government" Americans. First, there was this:

"There's misconceptions on what fusion centers are," he says. "The misconceptions are that we are conducting spying operations on US citizens, which is of course not the fact. That is absolutely not what we do."

Okay then. We've established won't you don't do. So, tell us, what do you do?

Davis says Arkansas hasn't collected much information about international plots, but they do focus on groups closer to home.

"We focus a little more on that, domestic terrorism and certain groups that are anti-government," he says. "We want to kind of take a look at that and receive that information."

Okay, hold on a second here. It would seem that his first statement is completely proven untrue by that second statement. Unless he's arguing that if someone classifies you as "anti-government" then you're no longer a US citizen, which would be a rather unique (and wrong) interpretation of the Constitution.

Elsewhere in the article, Davis defends what he does by playing the patriotism card, in which he can't actually explain what good he's doing, but just the fact that he's "doing something" after 9/11 is important.

"I do what I do because of what happened on 9/11," Davis says. "There's this urge and this feeling inside that you want to do something, and this is a perfect opportunity for me."

This line of argument is such ridiculously lazy and dangerous thinking. People who feel they need to "do something!" without caring as to what that something is or (more importantly) if it actually helps (or hurts) are not doing anyone any favors. They're just bound to cause more trouble.

from the it's-all-about-the-leverage dept

We've pointed out time and time again that there are still roles for the former gatekeepers in various content industries, but those roles are changing, because they now need to be enablers, helping to do things that content creators can't do on their own. We've also pointed out that one thing that "direct to fan" and other offerings have done is give content creators much more leverage in dealing with those traditional gatekeepers. It used to be, if you were a first time author, you didn't have very much leverage at all. You accepted the tiny advance and crappy book deal offered to you, in which the publisher basically took control over your work almost entirely, leaving a tiny royalty for you should you ever earn back the advance. However, the WSJ recently wrote about how self-publsihed ebook author Hugh Howey (who wrote the hugely popular Wool "postapocalyptic thriller" and sold half a million ebook copies) then sold the print rights to the book to Simon & Schuster and the movie rights to Ridley Scott for around $1 million but was able to retain the digital rights to the book for himself.

That is how leverage works. It's also a recognition of where a publisher can actually help. Howey knows that he can sell the digital book himself. He doesn't need any help with digital production, distribution or promotion. However, the physical book is a very different story, so having a big publisher handle printing and distribution for the physical book makes sense -- and given the fact he didn't need the help of a publisher, he was able to negotiate this more equitable deal. He notes that other publishers offered more money for a complete package, but it was easy to walk away, knowing he was making plenty of money on his own directly with the ebooks.

As the WSJ notes, it's all about the shifting balance of power, such that publishers no longer hold all the cards:

It's a sign of how far the balance of power has shifted toward authors in the new digital publishing landscape. Self-published titles made up 25% of the top-selling books on Amazon last year. Four independent authors have sold more than a million Kindle copies of their books, and 23 have sold more than 250,000, according to Amazon.

Publishing houses that once ignored independent authors are now furiously courting them. In the past year, more than 60 independent authors have landed contracts with traditional publishers. Several won seven-figure advances. A handful have negotiated deals that allow them to continue selling e-books on their own, including romance writers Bella Andre and Colleen Hoover, who have each sold more than a million copies of their books.

Simon & Schuster even admits that it wanted all of the rights, but that under these "unusual circumstances" it had no other choice. I get the feeling those "circumstances" will become less and less "unusual" going forward.

from the I-for-one-welcome-our-new-fedora-clad-robotic-overlords dept

This may seem like the sort of statement usually delivered by an overblown narrator as rockets and lasers go zooming* by, but here goes: In the world of journalism, the future is now! Granted, it's the kind of future that often makes waves in the present and raises at least as many questions as it answers, but if you wanted a bright, problem-free future, you'd have to travel back to the divergence point somewhere between Philip K. Dick and The Jetsons... and then eliminate the dystopians.

*Yes, I realize lasers don't make noise or "zoom" by, but that hasn't prevented George Lucas from becoming insanely rich, has it?

Journalist Ken Schwencke has occasionally awakened in the morning to find his byline atop a news story he didn’t write.

No, it’s not that his employer, The Los Angeles Times, is accidentally putting his name atop other writers’ articles. Instead, it’s a reflection that Schwencke, digital editor at the respected U.S. newspaper, wrote an algorithm — that then wrote the story for him.

Instead of personally composing the pieces, Schwencke developed a set of step-by-step instructions that can take a stream of data — this particular algorithm works with earthquake statistics, since he lives in California — compile the data into a pre-determined structure, then format it for publication.

His fingers never have to touch a keyboard; he doesn’t have to look at a computer screen. He can be sleeping soundly when the story writes itself.

This isn't exactly new news. (Then again, neither is the morning paper, but that's a discussion for another time...) Algorithmic story generation has been around for a few years now, with Narrative Science leading the field. A couple of years ago, Narrative Science was the story, rather than just the automated recap. George Washington University's website had covered a GWU baseball game with a longish recap that only got around to mentioning the opposing pitcher's perfect game in the seventh (out of eight) paragraph. Speculators wondered if a bot was behind this "ignoring the forest for the trees" recap. Narrative Science's techies were highly offended and responded by producing two algorithmically-generated recaps -- one from the home team POV and a more neutral piece.

The first concern with robo-journalism is often expressed by the journalists themselves: are we getting pushed out?

This robonews tsunami, he insists, will not wash away the remaining human reporters who still collect paychecks. Instead the universe of newswriting will expand dramatically, as computers mine vast troves of data to produce ultracheap, totally readable accounts of events, trends, and developments that no journalist is currently covering.

This is somewhat echoed by L.A. Times reporter Schwencke, who sees the algorithmic output as a boon for busy journalists.

Schwencke says the use of algorithms on routine news tasks frees up professional reporters to make phone calls, do actual interviews, or dig through sophisticated reports and complex data, instead of compiling basic information such as dates, times and locations.

“It lightens the load for everybody involved,” he said.

Schwenke's "bot" is rather simple, functioning best with a limited dataset and a minimum of formatting. Narrative Science's output is a bit more complex, allowing customers to adjust the "slant" of the generated stories. Not only that, but the software can cop an attitude, if requested.

The Narrative Science team also lets clients customize the tone of the stories. “You can get anything, from something that sounds like a breathless financial reporter screaming from a trading floor to a dry sell-side researcher pedantically walking you through it,” says Jonathan Morris, COO of a financial analysis firm called Data Explorers, which set up a securities newswire using Narrative Science technology. (Morris ordered up the tone of a well-educated, straightforward financial newswire journalist.) Other clients favor bloggy snarkiness. “It’s no more difficult to write an irreverent story than it is to write a straightforward, AP-style story,” says Larry Adams, Narrative Science’s VP of product. “We could cover the stock market in the style of Mike Royko.”

This leads to the ethical quandary presented by the use of bots. Is robo-generated journalism really journalism, and is the use of algorithms a betrayal of readers' trust, especially when a familiar name is on the byline? If factual errors are discovered, does the blame lie with the software, or with the journalist who agreed to let the article "write itself?"

The answer here isn't simple (and the question likely isn't even fully formed yet), but the key is transparency.

“People are already reading automated data reports that come to them, and they don’t think anything of it,” said Ben Welsh, a colleague of Schwencke’s at the Times.

Welsh says that responsibility for accuracy falls where it always has: with publications, and with individual journalists.

“The key thing is just to be honest and transparent with your readers, like always,” he said. “I think that whether you write the code that writes the news or you write it yourself, the rules are still the same.”

“You need to respect your reader. You need to be transparent with them, you need to be as truthful as you can… all the fundamentals of journalism just remain the same.”

Questions involving intellectual property are also raised, although they aren't discussed in these articles. Who holds the copyright on the generated articles? In Schwencke's case, these rights are likely retained by the L.A. Times. In the case of Narrative Science, it's probably defined by contractual terms with the end user. Once the contract is up, the generated articles' copyright reverts to the end user.

Schwencke's homebrewed algorithm is a different IP animal. If he switches papers, does he retain the right to the "bot?" Or is that algorithm, developed while employed with the L.A. Times, considered a "work for hire," and thus, the paper's property? Arguably, his algorithm is an extension of him, covering his area of expertise and designed to emulate his reporting. What if Schwencke generates a similar piece of software for his new employer? Would he be permitted to do this, or would this be prevented by additions to "non-compete" clauses? Is it patentable?

The more ubiquitous "robo-journalism" becomes, the more issues like these will arise. Hopefully, IP turf wars will remain at a minimum, allowing for the expansion of this promising addition to the journalist's toolset. With bots handling basic reporting, journalists should be freed up to pursue the sort of journalism you can't expect an algorithm to handle -- longform, investigative, etc. This is good news for readers, even if they may find themselves a little unnerved (at first) by the journalistic uncanny valley.